Rev. Shelvin Jerome Hall: 1916 - 2007

Rev. Shelvin Jerome Hall had led Friendship Baptist Church for 51 years and was a few months shy of his 91st birthday when he turned over leadership to a new pastor in November.

During those five decades, Rev. Hall more than tripled the membership of the church on Chicago's West Side, expanded its programs, served as a community activist and led state and national Baptist organizations.

Rev. Hall, 91, died Monday, May 21, after suffering cardiac arrest at West Suburban Resurrection Hospital in Oak Park. His wife of 62 years, Lucy Hall, died three weeks earlier.

Rev. Hall answered the phone at his West Side home by saying, "Friendship," and his wife knew to look in the church if any of her good furnishings turned up missing, said his daughter Shelvin Louise Hall, an Illinois Appellate Court justice.

"The church was his life," she said.

Rev. Hall held several leadership roles in Baptist Church organizations. He was dean of the Salem Baptist District Association and the Baptist General State Congress of Christian Education and president of the West Side Baptist Ministers Association. He also served two terms as president of the Baptist General State Convention of Illinois in the 1990s.

"That really was the pinnacle of his career," his daughter said.

A longtime community activist, Rev. Hall hosted Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 and later was the main advocate for preserving as a historic site the city lot that once housed an apartment building where the King family lived.

Rev. Hall held leadership roles with a long list of civic and other groups, including president of the North Lawndale Redevelopment Corp., the NAACP West Side branch and the national board of the One Church/One Child program; chairman of the family division of the Chicago Area Boy Scouts of America; and founding chairman of the board of the Community Bank of Lawndale.

Rev. Hall was passionate about education's role in changing young people's lives, his daughter said. He started a scholarship fund at the church 50 years ago that has helped hundreds of students attend college.

"My philosophy is that if we can get one college graduate in every family, we can wipe out welfare," he told the Tribune in 1999, when he was featured as a Chicagoan whose energy hadn't slowed as he aged.

When church members decided to build a new house of worship in the 1980s, Rev. Hall requested that it look like an African hut. The building, at 5200 W. Jackson Blvd., features pyramid-shaped windows and pews hewn from wood from Mozambique. Its bell tower is named after King.

"He wanted it to be a symbol ... to make that connection to the motherland," Shelvin Louise Hall said.

Rev. Hall was born in Yoakum, Texas. He graduated from high school during the Depression and worked for a doctor for six years before hitchhiking to Bishop College in Marshall, Texas. He took a suit and a hairbrush, which he kept until his death as a reminder of those lean years, his daughter said.

He graduated from Bishop in 1944 and later attended graduate school at Prairie View A&M University and Howard University. In 1940, he was licensed as a Baptist minister.

After marrying Lucy Lewis, he became pastor of a church in El Campo, Texas, while serving as an assistant principal of a high school in Carthage, Texas.

Rev. Hall is also survived by another daughter, L. Priscilla Hall, a New York State Supreme Court justice; a son, Lewis Jerome Hall, a supervisor with the New York State Office of Higher Education; and a granddaughter.